Life on Mars?

Digging through Hansard (as one does when one should be working) in search of Rodney Hide’s pearls of wisdom, I was most amused to read the speech made by Gordon Copeland. It traverses a well-trodden trail of sceptic talking points. Gordon manages to bring in British winemaking, the sun as a driver of climate change, before launching into this:

Unlike Rodney Hide, I am not a climate change scientist.

How wrong can a man be in so few words?

Therefore, my approach to this issue, as it would be with many others in this Committee, is to get the very best scientific explanation that we can from a number of sources that an increase in global warming is due to increasing levels of emissions. Whether those emissions are carbon-related is, as Rodney Hide has said, only a hypothesis. It is not fact. It has now been discovered that an increase in carbon levels over thousands of years follows a warming in the climate.

At this point Marian Hobbs tried to get Gordon back to the matter in hand (clause by clause debate of the ETS bill), but he wouldn’t be deflected:

The conventional wisdom in recent years has been that global warming follows increasing levels of carbon. If that is the case, then we would also expect Mars, for example, not to have had any change at all in its climate over many years because there is no carbon up there to emit. But, in fact, Mars is warming, as is Earth. Therefore, there is a link back to the sun.

Words fail me. I can only suggest that Jilted John might be on the right track (though, of course, I could not possibly suggest that he was technically correct).